Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making
Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. (Turner was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left
Harwich) I842, 9I x I22 cm. Clore Gallery,
Ruskin's opinion of
this painting is that this is the grandest statement of sea motion,
mist and light that has ever been put on canvas.
The painting above is the central detail not from the Turner Snow Storm but from my
attempt for demonstration purposes. Note I bent the mask even more than
Turner's. I also put Turner tied to the mask, as he was said to have been!
Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps.
was the first picture with which Turner printed lines of poetry
in the catalogue with a credit to an 'MS' poems 'Fallacies of Hope'.
Turner's pictures were becoming arranged,
compositionally, around 'vortexes', in which the picture emanates from a
central structure in a series of sweeps, as above for example. He also experimented with new forms, such as squares and octagons.
His was always a deliberate in development. The painting reveals the
extent to which Turner sees the style of the brushwork itself as a factor
of the impact of the painting. |
This is perhaps Turner's finest seascape, and indeed possibly the greatest depiction of
a storm in all art. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in I842.
Turner once claimed that in order to paint this scene he had `got the sailors to lash
me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to
escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did'. However, possibly he fabricated this
story, for it is similar to one told of the marine painter Joseph Vernet, and no ship
named the Ariel is known to have sailed from Harwich in the years leading up to
I842;
perhaps the title of the vessel was intended to allude to Shakespeare's The
Tempest.
Nor does the picture-title accord fully with what we actually see, for the ship is `going
by the lead', which denotes that a weighted line is being periodically dropped from
the
bow to gauge the shallowness of the waters so as to prevent the ship from running
aground. Yet such a prudent, measured precaution seems to be at odds with the actual
predicament of a vessel caught up in a maelstrom, even if we can appreciate
why the boat should be firing signal rockets to denote her position offshore.
Yet even if some or all of Turner's factual claims are false, and there seems to be
some disparity between the nautical behavior indicated in the title and what appears
to be actually happening to the Ariel, the veracity of Turner's communication of
what
it is like to be at the centre of a cataclysmic storm is beyond dispute, with the entire
visible universe wheeling in a massive vortex around both the steamer and also the
spectator. (And on the steamer, incidentally, we can see that its foremast and funnel
are located in the correct positions, which again indicates that Turner had
purposefully taken liberties with literal reality in The Fighting
Temeraire of three years earlier.) Turner was very vexed by reading a criticism of this work that it
represents a mass
of `soapsuds and whitewash', and was overheard to say· `soapsuds and whitewash!
What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea's like? I wish
they'd been in
it.' But today it is easier to appreciate that his freedom of handling imparts the raw
energy of a storm far more authentically than if he had painted even'
drop of rain or
every wave in the sea with greater degrees of verisimilitude. |
